Best Practices For Managing Your Email List
What is Email List Management?
Email list management is how you organize your business’s email subscribers. It’s the process of validating email addresses, getting rid of dead ones, and otherwise maintaining a healthy list.
When you regularly manage your email list, you ensure it’s up to date and accurate. This allows you to deliver more value to your digital email subscribers.
Why is it important?
Email list management is the core of your email marketing strategy. By maintaining an engaged list of subscribers, you can create content and offers that speak directly to your audience.
A strong email marketing strategy hinges on an active and engaged subscriber base. People sign up for your emails for different reasons, and many of them will lose interest at some point.
A certain percentage of people will eventually unsubscribe. Others won’t unsubscribe; they’ll just stop opening your emails altogether. Worse, your emails might go to their spam folders, which hurts your campaigns’ deliverability and, eventually, your sender reputation.
Email List Management best practices
Make new subscribers feel welcome
Maintaining your list begins at your first contact with a subscriber, when their experience with your brand is fresh in their mind and their excitement about your company is at an all-time high. This is best accomplished by sending an automated welcome email or series of emails triggered by their opt-in.
Keep your list clean
List hygiene is a buzzword in email marketing circles—and with good reason. Keeping your list clean is important to the success of your marketing efforts, and yet most businesses struggle with this aspect of list management..
Here’s some of what you’ll do when you clean:
- Remove duplicate addresses.
- Remove addresses with typos.
- Fix addresses with typos.
- Update invalid addresses.
- Remove invalid addresses.
- Delete emails from hard or soft bounces.
Don’t worry if you have a lot of invalid email addresses—people move, change jobs, and get new addresses all the time, often forgetting to update their opt-ins.
Removing these addresses from your list is important, as the higher your bounce rate is, the more it hurts your sender reputation and the less likely your mail get deliver..
Re-engage or eliminate old contacts
After you purged your list of all the incorrect, invalid emails, you should left with a stronger list of contacts. You still got some work to do, though, as some of those contacts are undoubtedly unengaged. An unengaged contact is one who has a valid email address and is still subscribed but doesn’t open or read your emails.
Even if they haven’t actually clicked that “Unsubscribe” button, they’re not connected to you and they’re probably deleting your emails anyway.
You have two options in dealing with your unengaged subscribers. You can purge their address since they’re not helping your sender reputation or your return-on-investment, or you can try to re-engage them.
Make unsubscribing easy
It seems wrong to make unsubscribing easy when the goal is to keep people on your list, but there’s no point in hiding it. If one of your contacts wants to unsubscribe, they’re going to—one way or another. If they can’t easily scan your email and see how they can unsubscribe, they’ll mark you as spam instead.
Having a prominent unsubscribe button keeps you on the right side of CANSPAM and keeps users happy, even if they aren’t a good fit for your message.
Don’t fret over using this technique. If users unsubscribe, they weren’t engaged, anyway.